We’re Changing Our Pricing Plans! Here’s What You Need to Know.

On July 11th, we’re going to roll out a few changes to our premium plans. While “Swell Pro” will no longer exist in its current form, we’re making sure that we do everything we can to minimize the impact on our current Pro users. And in many cases, you’ll find that you’re paying less than you currently are on Swell Pro! This blog post covers Swell’s new pricing in more detail.

Why is Swell Changing Its Pricing?

We’re making a change to achieve a greater degree of fairness and simplicity for ourselves, our partners, and (most importantly!) our merchants.

More specifically, we’re changing pricing because:

We’ve always offered a few extra services to merchants on our higher price plans, but it was time to formalize exactly what that “bundle” of services consists of. As merchants reach certain “tiers” on the Swell Pro plan, our team has in some cases extended additional benefits on a case-by-case basis — some extra help with setup, implementation of a bit of code on the merchant’s site, or in some cases even a bit of custom development work. We do this because on our higher price tiers, we can better justify dedicating team members to one account or another. As Swell grows though, it makes sense to formalize the practice so that we keep it fair for everybody — going forward, it would have been harder for us to offer these services on a one-off basis otherwise!

We needed to simplify our pricing structure. When we looked around at how other SaaS (software as a service) companies manage their pricing, we found that Swell Pro – with its 10 tiers based on order volume – stood to benefit from a bit of simplification. With three core tiers now (more on our tiers below!), we hope that our pricing will be much more straightforward to understand. The added benefit is that our price-per-order structure removes the “big jump” scenario — for example, somebody on Swell Pro with 399 orders gets charged $74, but somebody with 401 orders gets charged twice that!

The model is friendlier for our e-commerce platform partners. For those merchants on the Shopify platform, you’ll soon be able to add your charge for Swell directly to your monthly Shopify bill — no need to track charges separately anymore! In order to make that a reality, however, we needed to simplify our pricing model a bit. That allows Swell to more easily tell partner systems such as Shopify’s the appropriate amount to bill each account each month.

It’s also important to take note of an item which is not on our list: this is by no means an attempt to raise prices across the board. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of our merchants will find that they’re going to be paying even less than they are today! We’re extremely proud of the fact that our merchants earn a significant return on their investment in Swell. When it comes to pricing, that’s the one item we’ll never change!

Today, there are essentially two Swell plans: Free and Pro, where the price for Pro varies depending on how many total orders your store receives in a given month.

Moving forward, we’re introducing a few additional “tiers”, where each tier will include particular premium features that the tier below it does not. We’re calling these tiers Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Enterprise. Here’s a brief overview of each plan:

You’ll notice that pricing is still based on the number of orders your store receives each month; however, we’re making a slight change to how we calculate your monthly charge. Each of our plans comes with a certain number of orders included, and then a per order charge for any additional orders.

For example, let’s say that your store receives 850 orders per month, in which case you’d likely fit into our Gold plan. Your charge each month would be $249 for your first 800 orders, plus $10 for the 50 orders received above 800, for a total charge of $259. When our new pricing plan goes into effect, your account will include a complete breakdown as to how we arrive at your monthly charge.

In addition, anybody can choose to be on any plan at any time in order to “unlock” particular features. By default though, we’ll automatically put you on the lowest cost plan for your store!

Here’s an overview of the features which will be in each plan:

Bronze

If your store receives fewer than 100 orders per month, and you don’t require any of our premium features, you’re still more than welcome to use Swell for free. We’re simply changing the name of the plan from “Free” to “Bronze”! Besides the name change, our free plan remains very much free for those with fewer than 100 orders.

Silver

The Silver plan will come with all of the key features most widely utilized by Swell Pro merchants today, including the ability to:

The Gold plan is designed with a slightly higher-volume merchant in mind. Historically, we’ve provided a few additional services exclusively to merchants in this bucket anyways — the changes to the pricing model are simply our way of reflecting what we’ve already been doing! Gold features include:

All Silver features!

Custom Actions. Our “Custom Actions”, or the ability to reward your customers for virtually anything, is the only feature currently available to all Pro merchants which we’re moving to a higher tier. However, because custom actions require a developer to send “notifications” to Swell automatically, we’ve found that this feature is best utilized by Gold-level merchants and higher regardless.

Priority Support. Whether in chat or via email, Gold merchants will enjoy faster response times than the rest of our merchants. In addition, phone support will be available exclusively to merchants on the Gold plan and above going forward.

Platinum

The Platinum plan is designed for merchants who require some of Swell’s most powerful, industry-leading features. Swell’s Platinum plan includes:

All Gold features!

Full Access to the JS SDK. Swell’s SDK allows merchants to place virtually any aspect of your program – popups, links, points balances, etc. – anywhere on your online store.

Program Consulting and Onboarding. Prior to program launch, our team will serve as a thought partner to help design a program which fits your business perfectly given our experience with thousands of other stores.

Quarterly Business Reviews. To ensure that your store’s unique program is utilizing Swell’s latest features and identified best practices, members of the Swell team will schedule an appointment every 3 months to review your program’s progress and suggest changes.

For those merchants who still require features above and beyond what the Platinum plan has to offer, we’re also offering our “Enterprise” plan on a case-by-case basis. The Enterprise plan will consist of features such as custom development, dedicated servers, SLAs, and much more.

Pricing for Enterprise will be determined on a custom basis, and is designed for merchants with approximately 15,000 orders per month and above.

What Will Happen if I’m on Swell Pro Currently?

If you’re currently a Pro merchant, we’re going to do everything in our power to make the transition seamless for you. For most of you, your monthly charge will remain largely unaffected, or will decline; remember, our new plans are designed for simplicity, not for price increases!

If you find that your monthly charge is going to increase by more than $20 as a result of the new pricing structure, please send us an email, and we’ll work with you to ensure that you remain unaffected!

If you or your team has any questions regarding our new pricing structure, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. And most importantly, thanks so much for being a “Swell” merchant!

Comments

I am sorry, I just don’t understand why your company is entitled to a percentage of an order that did not come through referrals. We’d love to consider your app, but this does not seem fair.

“We designed our pricing plan this way to encourage you to enroll as many customers as possible in your program without having to worry about paying for each one!” — Have no idea how this is supposed to be good for a business like ours, i.e. less worry.

Hey Brad, thanks for the comment! We use total orders for a very specific reason: Swell contains a rewards program, referral program, and email capture tool all in one, and we want to encourage our merchants to use the full suite! It would therefore become infeasible to separate out who’s using which tools, as well as what “counts” as an order which we’re entitled to charge for. Instead, to encourage merchants to use the full suite, we simply use total orders as a “best estimate” to gauge how much each merchant will make from Swell.

We’ve designed our pricing extremely carefully to ensure that our merchants make more money from Swell than we make from them as well As we detailed in our most recent blog post, the average merchant earns a significant return from Swell after just a few months using the service.

Hi, I have a question to ensure I understand correctly, so on your example of 850 orders/month, I should be paying 259$ although it could be possible that none of them comes from the loyalty program. Am I right? your pricing is dependent on total sales per month regardless of how the loyalty program is working?

Yes Yasser, that’s exactly right — Swell’s pricing plans are based on total orders received by the store, not just those that come from one component of our platform! We’ve designed pricing extremely carefully to ensure that merchants earn multiples of our monthly fees, and order volume is simply our way of approximating how much value each merchant is likely to derive from Swell. Most importantly, the average Swell merchant earns $9 for every $1 invested in Swell! For more Pricing FAQs, feel free to take a look at our Help section: http://help.swellrewards.com/collection/4-pricing-information.